How far will you make it without a degree

Ancalagon said:
There's another aspect to consider.

So, sometimes you will hear people saying, Bill Gates didn't have a degree and he turned out okay. And they will give a long list of examples of people who never finished their university degrees and went on to make billions. One notable exception is Elon Musk, who has two bachelors degrees (one in economics, one in physics). I think Zuckerberg graduated but I'm not sure.

Anyway, to those people I say, Bill Gates would have made billions or at the very least tens of millions with or without a degree. It didn't matter to him. If he'd stayed in college, maybe Microsoft would have been delayed. Maybe he would have ended up as the CEO of Oracle or something. The point is, Bill Gates had it made just by being Bill Gates. A degree would not have ruined him.

Not all of us are so lucky. Not all of us are the Bill Gates of the world. For a lot of us, a degree helps you get your foot in the door, helps your CV stand out, and definitely helps with immigration. Being born in the USA, immigration wasn't an issue for Bill Gates or any of the other tech billionaires.
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Although bill gates had the benefit of being born into a wealthy family with which came many interesting "lucky" opportunities that allowed him to ultimately build Microsoft, if you do some digging into why MS is so successful you will see that Bill Gates and Elon have a very similar ethos to work. They both work all day, everyday, even weekend, little to no time off (especially in their early years). Interestingly Bill Gates and his friends skipped school classes and spent all their evenings and weekends at the University working on programming - many people don't have that kind of discipline and passion now and the world of knowledge is right at their fingertips in their own homes. I also suspect their IQ is far higher than your average Joe as well as have a knack for thinking about things differently and willing to take massive risks for even larger reward. I think you'd be hard pressed to find many people like that in the world, nevermind just taking those without qualifications into account.
 
cguy said:
Agreed. Bill Gates was also a perfect confluence - being at the right place, at the right age, just as possibly the biggest technological booms in history was warming up. Him, Jobs, Zuckerberg, etc. were serendipitously located in every way. The vast majority of technical entrepreneurial successes are well qualified (Bezos, Brinn, Page, Hastings, Huang, Etc.), and of not, most of their senior staff are (Nadella, Schroeofer, Cook, etc.).

People who cite BG or SJ, either don’t know history, stats or both. ;)
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Was reading a book a few weeks back called Outliers and the findings are quite astonishing.

The guy started off by noticing that all top tier ice hockey players were generally born in the first few months of the year. This is significant because the new recruiting season starts at the beginning of the year for young kids so those that have a birthday earlier in the year tend to be more developed, bigger and more coordinated than those who have birthdays later in the year which leads to them being drafted for specialised classes etc when they young which leads to advantages throughout their life so others never catch up. This was basically true across every sport with regards to birthdays and draft dates.

The more relevant part here is that if you look at the age of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the like that started these big tech firms, you would have had to be born in the years 1953-1955 (cant remember exact dates they specified) to be at the right point in life to take advantage of all the tech changes that were coming when they hit their early 20s - of which these people all were. Although there was a lot of effort, time etc spent in building these companies - statistically the chance of someone being born before or after those certain years are practically zero as you would be too early for adoption or have missed it completely.
 
For anyone to compare anything with Bill Gates / Steve Jobs as a success benchmark is pretty unrealistic to be honest.

Bill Gates' net worth is at ~$105 Billion now - that's about ~1/3 of South Africa's GDP.

If you can do something that's ~0.1% of what Gates did, that's well over a $100,000,000 - you probably went pretty far already.
 
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ronald911 said:
For anyone to compare anything with Bill Gates / Steve Jobs as a success benchmark is pretty unrealistic to be honest.

Bill Gates' net worth is at ~$105 Billion now - that's about ~1/3 of South Africa's GDP.

If you can do something that's ~0.1% of what Gates did, that's well over a $1,000,000 - you probably went pretty far already.
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0.1% is also over $100m. :p
 
Go work for a bank, your career will soar without a degree if and only if:
1) You learn to love the sound of you voice
2) Learn some buzz words

The only value that a degree has is that it helps you leave this country.

Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
 
cguy said:
I know such people too - not where I’ve ever worked though. Thing is, no company or person worth their salt believes that a degree is a sufficiency condition, so it really doesn’t matter at all that such people exist. These people should really be weeded out in the interview process - if not, the company has poor hiring standards and should be avoided at all costs. So if these people are your colleagues, you should really consider a job move. :)

What does matter is whether or not a degree affects expectation, and it most certainly does. Interview testing appropriate for the level should of course still be done, but a company can filter the candidates early, based on both degree and/or quality and quantity of experience, in order to more efficiently find the right candidate for a given position.
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You can fail people in interviews by asking asking questions and phrasing it in differing ways. Kinda why we always print it and ask interviewee for their interpretation. Basic stuff people don’t do arguably on purpose if you ask me.

One thing I’ve noticed over the years though is that hiring a delivery focused person is trickier than ever. I think the miss rate in that likely very high in industry based on what I see in teams ive interacted with. Ie they hire someone who ticks all the knowledge + degree requirements but suck balls vs actually doing the work haha.
 
krycor said:
You can fail people in interviews by asking asking questions and phrasing it in differing ways. Kinda why we always print it and ask interviewee for their interpretation. Basic stuff people don’t do arguably on purpose if you ask me.

One thing I’ve noticed over the years though is that hiring a delivery focused person is trickier than ever. I think the miss rate in that likely very high in industry based on what I see in teams ive interacted with. Ie they hire someone who ticks all the knowledge + degree requirements but suck balls vs actually doing the work haha.
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I’ve definitely seen some of the above - I’ve seen two occasions where the interviewer didn’t ask the question properly, one leaving out necessary constraints, and another adding a bunch of unnecessary detail, so the actually question was obscured.

One of the things I do is ask the candidates detailed questions about the work in their resumes. The type of response and level of detail that they can go into usually gives a fair idea of how much of what they said they did, they actually did. We do this precisely to determine if they are trying to game the system, and have lousy real world work ethic or personality/collaboration issues.

For inexperienced hires, we tend to look at degrees, GPAs, any large side projects or in-degree projects they worked on, etc. This is to get a feeling for how much of the project work they actually did, and how motivated they are.
 
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I'm currently a senior software engineer in the aviation industry. Self-taught (I have matric), but I've done a bunch of certifications and courses (non-varsity level stuff).

Yes, it can be done, but if I had to do it over, I would have gotten a degree mainly because it makes immigration so much easier. I spent 10 years in the USA and had to jump through some serious hoops w.r.t immigration due to not having a degree.
 
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